Monthly Archives: August 2002

What a country! Heh heh! An enterprising fellow has put an auction up on Ebay offering to write a ‘personalised rock anthem for the winning bidder. Top bid is currently $132.00 but the best part of it all is the lengthy description of the ‘prize’. #6. Song will be 4 to 5 minutes long, unless I pass out during the bridge, in which case, it may be much longer. [via Fark]

So Toshiba has announced a new – and as yet unnamed – Bluetooth headset which incorporates voice recognition. Not only that, but it can also handle CD quality audio, which makes it something of a versatile beast all round. Apparently the idea is that you can use the headset’s internal voice recognition system to send commands to Bluetooth enabled devices like laptops and home appliances, as well as listen to groovy sounds from your hi-fi. You will even be able…

Digital media manufacturer Verbatim has launched the ultimate in groovy chic media, the Digital Vinyl CD-R disc. These cool looking discs are being marketed as the ideal way to catalogue and store your music collection with style. Nice idea. [via techhead news]

Sanyo Electric has announced the DSC-MZ3 digital camera which will shoot VGA sized (640×480) video at 30 frames per second, which effectively means that you can shoot VCR quality video on a tiny digital device. Most digicams currently offer only half that resolution at a measly 10 frames ps or so. The trade off is that even whwn using a 1GB microdrive with the camera, you will only be able to store 12 minutes of footage, but what the hey?

So you have a shiny new laptop with a built-in DVD player, but feel hampered by the constraints of Region coding? Want to play disks outside your region without having to resort to firmware upgrades or other crude hacks? Then you need DVD Region-Free. This remarkable $39.95 software installs seamlessly onto your desktop or laptop computer and will transparently let you play a DVD from any region without changing settings on your player software or machine. I tried it with…

Sony has released details of a new game pad designed for the Clie Palm powered PDA. The $39.99 PEGA GC10 straps onto the device just below the screen and provides all those cool and groovy buttons and stuff that real gamers need. It will be released in October.

According to this short threaded discussion at BargainPDA, the P800 smartphone is not likely to be released now until Q4 of this year and not Q3 as earlier reported. In fact the odds are shortening that it won’t be until December. Mind you, the Ferret does appear to be remarkably prescient at times.

Oh no, apparently there is now a growing sub-culture which is developing elite skills in SMS text messaging. According to this The Age article from down under, Sony Ericsson is now sponsoring a Text Message Championship (how fast can you send a 40 character message? – the record is 28.49 seconds) apparently inspired by tales of amazing skill by sms wizards – “I watched as a girl sent off a picture, message and sound in one go without looking at…

This New York Times article suggests that Apple may be considering the launch of a smartphone. The evidence comes from looking at the successful evolution of the iPod into a PDA type device and from a recent statement by Steve Jobs – “We decided that between now and next year, the P.D.A. is going to be subsumed by the telephone,” he said last week in an interview. “We think the P.D.A. is going away.”

Anyone in any doubts as to the sales potential of the new breed of digicam phones like the Nokia 7650 should take a look at the burgeoning market for software add-ons. The Handy range of programs, for instance, includes programs to track car and general expenses as well as shopping lists.

Many moons ago Philips launched a universal remote control called the Pronto which was cool, but very expensive and quite clunky. The company has now released a stripped down version of the Pronto software for the Palm PDA called ProntoLite, which means that you can now turn your Palm into a Pronto universal remote controller. The eval version is free, registration costs $19.95. Press release here. [via infosync] A nice alternative is the veteran OmniRemote product.

So Casio has released a new 2.0 megapixel version of their Exilim super slim digital camera. This DPReview report also contains links to two sites with photo samples and I’ve got to say they look quite good for such a tiny device. The bad news is that prices for the model start at £299.99, with the MP3 player version stomping in at a weighty £350.00.

Ho ho! The Lapvantage Dome is a very cool way for Apple iMac wannabes to play in the game. It’s basically nothing more than an iMac shaped stand for laptops, but at $69.95 for the deluxe version it’s bound to sell well to the designer tech crowd. [via BoingBoing]

So children in the US (and maybe similarly over here too?) are being exposed to over 1500 commercial messages a day? And we wonder about attention deficit syndrome. Sheesh! This article talks about fighting back via something called media literacy. Mmm, not sure.